I just finished reading the book Monster: The Autobiography of an L.A. Gang Member, and I’m glad I did. Finish it, I mean.
Monster Kody Scott is recruited into a gang (the Crips) when he’s 11 and he mostly describes in his book how that went and how they “dropped bodies”, i.e. murdered people. Mostly other gang members. Often times he compares his gang activities to the Vietnam war or his gang to the military, and while at maybe two places he hints at feeling a slight bit of remorse for murdering people, in general he glorified gangs more than anything else.
He writes about time spent in jail. At some point, I got the idea that he wanted to be seen as a morally superior guy for the fact that he kept one of his cell mates from sodomizing the other one, although he silently tolerated all the torture he had put him through before that (severly beating him, peeing on him, making him eat soap, etc.) Yeah, wow, what a great guy you are, Kody.
In the end he meets a Muslim in prison who tells him that “New Africans” should stick together and fight against the white oppression and so forth, and again I thought to myself what a moron Kody is to listen to that guy’s reasoning. Sure, I do believe that blacks still get discriminated against in the US and I’m strongly against discrimination. But this guy’s reasoning was that “human” has the word “hue” in it, which means colored, and so only colored people are real people. White people mutated, degenerated, and they’re just a “kind of man”, a.k.a. as “mankind”. O-kay, whatever gets the gangster off the streets, I guess… I’d like to hear his reasoning in German, though.
So, the book got on my nerves and Kody Scott’s writing got on my nerves and his reasoning and justifications and so forth. I do not recommend this book.
